If you haven’t seen the story, the upshot is that some reflected light shows up every non-overcast day on someone’s house in Calgary, and the resulting image looks something like a cross between Gollum and the Reddit mascot. Thus, aliens.

Waves of UFO sightings over the waters of Lake Erie are earning the great lake a reputation as a UFO hot spot. But the lake’s new popularity may have more to do with a string of popular videos on YouTube than sightings of little green men.

After allegedly hacking into NASA websites -- where he says he found images of what looked like extraterrestrial spaceships -- the 40-year-old Briton faces extradition to the United States from his North London home. If convicted, McKinnon could receive a 70-year prison term and up to $2 million in fines.

Scientists behind the world’s largest distributed computing project are about to take a closer look at some of the most promising of the billions of radio signals they’ve collected in their search for intelligent life in outer space.

THEY SHOW UP EVERY SUMMER: spirals and interlocking rings, alchemical and shamanic symbols, massive mandalas and Mandelbrot sets, all cut into swaths of land — some as large as two football fields set side by side.

But now technological advances have opened the way for scientists to check millions of previously unknown star systems, dramatically increasing the chances of finding intelligent life in outer space in the next 25 years...